Philomena and the back story of a D.C. insider
By: Todd S. Purdum January 20, 2014 06:04 AM EDT

He was one of the unseen insiders who make Washington run: a top expert on congressional redistricting whose legal work at the Republican National Committee helped the GOP win the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He was a terrific cook, and a demon dancer and DJ. He worshiped Notre Dame football, St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish, and his darkly handsome looks turned more than one head — of both genders.

But Michael Anthony Hess also grappled with two realities that would have been dislocating for anyone: He was a gay Republican lawyer in an era of much greater political and cultural divisiveness over homosexuality. And he was an adopted child, the son of an unwed mother who had given him up for motives he never fully understood and that haunted him for life.

Now, nearly two decades after his death from AIDS at age 43 — and to the surprise of some of his former co-workers and bosses — Hess is the central presence (or, more precisely, the central absence) at the heart of “Philomena,” the hit Academy Award best-picture nominee for which Dame Judi Dench just snagged her seventh Oscar nod. Dench portrays Philomena Lee, a frightened young Irishwoman who was shamed by the Catholic Church into giving her toddler son up for adoption to an American couple in 1955, then years later, embarked on a desperate quest to find him.

Michael Hess (named Anthony Lee at birth) was that son. He was born in the Irish abbey where his pregnant mother had sought refuge and, after his birth, was compelled into servitude for more than three years. His adoption was part of a program of forced adoptions practiced at the time by the Roman Catholic Church. Michael was raised by his adoptive family in St. Louis and Rockford, Ill., and in the last years of his life, he undertook a parallel search to find his birth mother. But the nuns at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Tipperary, Ireland, told neither mother nor son of the other’s repeated inquiries.

Some top Republicans have been just as surprised to learn of the twisting tale. (And if you haven’t seen the movie, multiple spoilers lurk beyond this sentence.)

“But for you, I wouldn’t have known that Michael Hess was the child that was given up for adoption,” said Haley Barbour, who was chairman of the RNC when Hess, then its general counsel, died in 1995. “He did a good job, and that’s what mattered.” Barbour added in an interview: “I had been told” that he was gay, “but that wasn’t any of my business.”

Scott Reed, then the party’s executive director, was equally in the dark. “I didn’t know him personally that well,” he recalled. “If you have a competent lawyer, they give you comfort, and he was a very competent lawyer.”

Indeed, Hess’s story summons up a time — not so distant in years, but ages ago in public perception — when it was all but impossible to be an openly gay Republican at the top levels of Washington politics, as the AIDS crisis raged and the Moral Majority crusaded against the evils of homosexuality. Today, a former GOP chairman, Ken Mehlman, is campaigning openly on behalf of gay marriage, and one of the party’s top legal talents, Ted Olson, has pressed the cause all the way to the Supreme Court.

Still, the party’s conservative wing — and, to a lesser degree, its elected establishment — remains stubbornly opposed to gay rights. Just last year, to the dismay of reform elements, the RNC itself passed a resolution affirming its opposition to gay marriage. Jay Banning, the party’s longtime former chief financial officer and a contemporary of Hess’s, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“I don’t want to discuss that, sorry,” said Banning, who himself is gay, before quickly hanging up.

But even in the 1980s and ’90s, there was a vibrant underground of quietly gay staffers at party headquarters and on Capitol Hill, as many of Hess’s contemporaries readily acknowledged.

“We all knew he was gay,” Mary Matalin, then a young RNC staffer, recalled. “In fact, I had a crush on him anyway. A lot of people did.”

The new film is based on a 2009 book, “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,” a novelistic re-imagining of the true story by the British journalist Martin Sixsmith, who helped Philomena Lee learn of her son’s fate in 2004. In the movie, Hess’s story is told sparingly, through silent home-movie flashbacks.

But his tale is the heart of the book, which portrays him as tortured by his sexual identity, determined to hide it and at pains to defend his political work to other gay friends at a time when the Reagan administration was largely silent on AIDS and party strategists like Lee Atwater were making not-so-subtle homophobic appeals to win votes.

Steve Dahllof, Hess’s partner for the last 15 years of his life, said in a telephone interview that the book was “about a three out of 10, in terms of accuracy,” while the movie, “in accuracy of spirit, is 10 out of 10.” He said the book had “portrayed Michael as this very dark, brooding type of person that he was not,” though he acknowledged that Hess “didn’t let very many people in.”

Still, Dahllof said, all of Hess’s bosses and colleagues in the party knew he was gay and had a partner.

“It didn’t need to be part of the conversation,” recalled Dahllof, who has just retired as president and CEO of Asia Pacific operations for Ogilvy Public Relations in Hong Kong. “Now it’s more relaxed. Society has moved on. He was never tormented by his sexuality. He was a Republican, more a fiscal Republican than a social Republican. We really didn’t talk politics that much.”

In fact, if Hess was consumed by anything, it was his search for his biological mother.

“Was Michael tortured?” Dahllof asked. “No, he wasn’t tortured. But he had this deep desire to find his biological mother, to understand her. He held his Irish roots very deep. There were always Irish flags around the house. St. Patrick’s Day was huge around our house. He was an amazing singer. In a piano bar in D.C., he sang ‘Danny Boy,’ and the place went from very noisy to dead silent.”

Young Anthony was adopted just before Christmas 1955 by Michael Hess, a urologist from suburban St. Louis, and his wife, Marjorie, who had three biological sons of their own but wanted a daughter. When Marjorie Hess first visited the abbey, she was attracted to a little girl named Mary, and then to the little boy — Anthony — who wouldn’t leave her side. In the end, the Hesses adopted both children, and they rechristened the boy Michael, in honor of his adoptive father.

Sixsmith depicts the elder Hess as a martinet, and by the end of Michael’s life, the two were essentially estranged. “Doc” Hess learned only after his son’s death that Michael was both gay and had been struggling with AIDS. “It was a situation where the family just didn’t know this whole other part of his life,” recalled Robert Higdon, one of Hess’s closest friends and the former executive director of the Prince of Wales Foundation in Washington.

In Sixsmith’s telling, Hess’s first political experience was as a teenage Senate page for the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois. But by the time he had graduated from Notre Dame and earned a law degree at George Washington University, and was working as a staff lawyer at the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers, a nonpartisan group (now known as the International Municipal Lawyers Association) that offers legal advice to local governments, he had become a supporter of Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980.

At the same time, however, he had become an expert in the arcane field of legislative redistricting. After Ronald Reagan’s election — and disillusioned by Carter’s defeat — he was looking for new opportunities and was recruited by the RNC to help reverse decades of gerrymandering by state legislatures that had protected white Democrats at the expense of both Republicans and racial and ethnic minorities. The reasons for his political conversion are not entirely clear. But Dahllof noted: “He always said, ‘What other job could I have in which I get to argue in front of the Supreme Court?’”

The Republicans’ strategy — fought out in a series of controversial court cases and legislation in the 1980s and ’90s — was to “pack” black and Latino voters into super-concentrated congressional districts that all but guaranteed the election of racial minorities but made the remaining districts newly competitive for Republicans.

“It was the ‘outs’ making common cause against the ‘ins,’” said E. Mark Braden, one of Hess’s mentors and predecessors as chief counsel at the RNC. “You created majority-minority districts, and the leavings were often friendly to Republicans. By effectively electing more black members, you blew up the established system and permitted the election of Republicans. You blew up a lot of white Democratic incumbents and scrambled the eggs.”

Critics of the practice argue that it has also diluted black electoral influence by diminishing the number of multiracial districts in which black candidates might have a chance of winning, creating safe Republican seats instead. But all agree that the strategy was a crucial component in the Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 and of the party’s enduring dominance in House races since.

When Benjamin Ginsberg, perhaps the Republicans’ pre-eminent election lawyer, became chief counsel in 1989, he asked Hess to remain his deputy. “I really wanted him to stay on because he had an encyclopedic and legendary knowledge about redistricting,” Ginsberg recalled. “He was a calm, gentle soul. He was a very good guy to work with, very well-liked within the building.”

When Ginsberg left the RNC for private practice in 1993, Hess succeeded him as chief counsel, but within a year or so, he received his HIV diagnosis. Higdon noted that this was after newly reported AIDS cases had crested among affluent gay men but before anti-retroviral therapies for the disease were widely available to prolong life. “By then, either you had it or you didn’t,” Higdon said. “Michael just never got healthy again after he was diagnosed.”

Sixsmith’s book portrays Hess as carousing in biker bars, but Dahllof said the reality was much tamer. The couple, who lived in the Wyoming Apartments in the Kalorama section of Washington, bought a cabin in Shepherdstown, W.Va., and worked weekends rebuilding it. “We became residents of the country to have a quiet life.”

Dahllof, Higdon and Hess’s other friends and co-workers all resist tendencies in the book and movie to caricature or pigeonhole him as a gay man, or a Republican, or anything else. He was, above all, they say, a whole person. He followed Notre Dame football zealously but also cooked homemade chutneys that won prizes at the Shepherdstown fair. He spun music mixes not only in clubs around town, but also for his friends on a Friday or Saturday night at home.

“He had an insatiable curiosity and would read voraciously — from Spin magazine to the American Bar Association magazine to the Village Voice,” Dahllof said. “He could discuss anything — and in some detail — from sports scores to international politics.”

Braden, the former RNC counsel, said he was aware of Hess’s search for his mother in Ireland. “We talked a little about how you would do it, sort of the notion of whether it made sense.”

In those days of the Internet’s functional infancy, Hess left no stone unturned, poring over Irish records and twice visiting the Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea.

“We spent so many cold, damp, drizzly days in Ireland looking for his mother,” recalled Dahllof, who is known in the book and movie by the pseudonym Pete Nilsson . “He knew her last name was Lee. He would think maybe we’d run across her. Every time we’d see a cemetery, he’d stop and look for her name. At the abbey, the nuns were incredibly hospitable and nice and sweet. They just said they didn’t have any records, which I guess was true. But we later learned that they’d had a bonfire to burn the records.”

Hess’s funeral was held at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Capitol Hill, on a blisteringly hot day in August 1995. Mark Braden recalled: “One of the lines I can remember that I said is, ‘We should be singing the Notre Dame fight song, rather than all these hymns.’’’

“It was just so sad,” Robert Higdon added. “I remember thinking: His mother will never know who her son is.”

Thanks to Hess’s dying wish, that turned out not to be true, because he asked Dahllof to have his ashes buried at Sean Ross Abbey. With help of friends on the board of a Catholic charity — the World Mercy Fund — and a generous contribution to the sisters, Dahllof did just that.

And in 2004, in an overgrown cemetery near the ruins of a former monastery, that is where Philomena Lee found a simple headstone of black marble, bearing these words: “Michael A. Hess. A Man of Two Nations and Many Talents. Born July 5, 1952, Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea. Died August 15, 1995, Washington, DC, USA.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the year Michael Hess was born. It was 1952.